Scrapworm
The 20th century provided art with two vital tools, copying and collaging. It has been a century since early modernists realized the power and urgency of the use of the printed media image. Artists could pull images from their everyday lives straight into their art. Collage documented the times and created a new visual poetry. It defined modernist art making and provided electronic programmers with the basic practice precepts for computerized digital graphics - photoshop and drag and drop. Lucky for us some artists still insist on using analog.
Scrapworm has created a powerful and lyrical show with her recent collaged works. In the past she has worked creating massive and fantastic installations and sculptures. While at 40 Worth Street I watched as she turned her studio, a former accounting office, into Mad Max’s Thunderdome. Her works exploded through the flooring, into and out of the walls and drop down ceilings, and spilled into the recesses of every available corner. Sprawl never looked so cool! It was thrilling and
fantastic to see.
In this show she has applied her sensibilities and techniques to collaged images. Most of these images come from vintage news magazines, and have been copied by the hundreds. They repeat like a
mantra, stuttering and clattering along. The photos document a time of rising American power, cold war politics and civil unrest. They are all in black and white, and they have that look of serious business that only news photos can give. She takes these elements, tears them, overlays them and collages them into emphatic visual statements.
The works are fast and strong. Some of the pieces act like landscapes, bounded and mapped. They are not images of open space but maps of borders and containment. They allude to an implied threat that tells a map-reader “You Are Here.” Your position is known. There is a large piece that sprawls to the front of the gallery space like an atlas of mid-century humanity. It's almost like she is desperate to remember something important, repeating and forgetting at the same moment,
tearing away at the images while building them up, trying to absorb their essence so they won't be forgotten. As Prince once sang, “there’s joy in repetition” and here the repetition drives one to the edge of a beauty that joyfully teeters out of bounds.
Yet Scrapworm doesn't let herself get bogged down with kitschy historical discourse. Her look at the 50’s is from our perspective. The images bring to mind our current time of endless war, government power and human suffering. There is a feeling of dread through all of this work, and it is stark and unrelenting in its presentation. Scrapworm spares us no visual moment. She repeats the focus, tearing into the image and watching it replicate out of control and off the edge. The
idea, the moment and the images spread beyond their containments spilling into the room, just as her 3d works have done. Scrapworm is constantly testing the physical limits of her art, and through her art, the limits placed on all of us.
This is a wonderful and exciting show.
Scrapworm is showing at chashama area space 208 West 37th Street until February 28.
© Mark Stone all rights reserved
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